The Disordered world of Eating

When you don’t have an official diagnosis for an issue you are struggling with, it can be hard to know whether your symptoms, if you’d even call them that, are actually real; Whether your habits or quirks actually constitute a legitimate problem.

It’s one thing to have the certainty of a diagnosis, a binary yes or no answer, and it’s another thing to feel something is off but to be unsure of exactly what that might be. 

Disordered Eating, unlike Eating Disorders, is a way in which we have adapted our style of food consumption.  

In some way, we’re all guilty of disordered eating. And this behaviour or way/routine/ritual or style is unique and different for us all. Disordered eating, like the concept of Body Image and Mental Health is nuanced and variable and thus needs to be understood in the context of a spectrum. 

This spectrum of disordered eating is flanked on one end by diagnosable Eating Disorders categorised as mental illness, and at the other extreme existing whereby a state of complete ease with food and body image exists.  

In between those extremes is where most of us live. The truth is we all have a disordered way of relating to food, be it through food rules that we apply - only 1 piece of bread on my sandwich please - to the time of day that we confine our eating to by intermittent fasting.

We normalise these habits that we develop and create a language around them.

However, they don’t exist in a vacuum.  

The intense societal messaging around what, how and when we eat, stems from the pressure that’s exerted by large industries such as fashion and beauty to pharmaceutical and the diet industry

In fact, these big businesses and large consumer industries prey on a weakness that’s been fostered from a very early age and develops slowly but stealthily through the ages and stages of our lives.

We’ve been existing, somewhat unconsciously, by obediently following the subtle rules of the game. We’ve followed the path of diet culture and absorbed them as gospel, the rules - both written and unwritten. It’s led many through the maze of what’s considered to be healthy/unhealthy living and eating. 

Healthy attitudes and behaviour with eating, food and diet is the result of a complex interplay between the social, emotional, biological and physiological impact on our lives. Mental health and what it means is very nuanced and anything but absolute.

Eating, food and how to manage appetite and consumption is complex and cannot merely be evaluated with a “calories in, calories out” approach or be diagnosed with the certainty of numbers on a scale or a BMI.

It’s a lifelong process of learning and unlearning.

Our beliefs of who we are, good and bad, have come down to the same way we’ve learned to categorise food: sugar and carbs as bad and vegetables and proteins as good.  

Our weight, whether over/under or somewhere in between, contrary to popular belief, is not the effect of, but often merely a symptom of eating challenges.

The connection with how we look and how we feel is not about vanity and not solely about one’s appearance.  We’ve been taught and have learned to equate our worth with how we look. Not with who we are or what we do but with how we physically appear to others.

It’s not surprising, then, just how much our overall self-esteem is impacted.

Bryony Gordon, a mental health advocate, has just bravely written about her challenges with binge eating disorder (BED) and summarised this problem well in The Telegraph: “As long as weight is seen as one of the chief signifiers of someone’s worth, we will never be able to approach food in a healthy way. BED has much deeper psychological roots than simply being ashamed of your body. Usually, it is the result of being ashamed generally.”

The charity Beat found that this year there was a 195 per cent increase in numbers attending their online support groups and a 173 per cent jump in helpline calls, compared to the same period in 2020. These are real numbers and the increase in them is telling. We’re clearly in crisis - not much nuanced about that.

If you recognise yourself in this, please get the help you need from those who understand this complex experience. 

There’s a fine line between having a serious problem and needing help and having some problems but not feeling that they’re serious enough to merit help.

Not only do you still need the help, but you deserve it. 

Any decent therapist will tell you that no problem is too big or too small. It’s like when the good teachers used to say - there are no stupid questions. Just Ask.

My colleagues and I at The Soke take a similar view: there’s no silly problem - just talk.  

Contact us today if you feel that you would benefit from discussing your situation with someone at The Soke.